The New York Times rightly featured an image of the Palestinian terrorist attack in southern Israel on its front page on August 19, 2011. It was, after all, a deadly, multi-pronged attack from the Sinai of a kind not seen in many years. (The Times itself, needless to say, refrained from actually calling it a terrorist attack.)

Yet, while the attacks primarily targeted and killed civilians, the image was one of soldiers.

And, in what is virtually an art form of misdirection and circumlocution at the paper, editors managed to shade the language of the caption to omit the targeting of Israeli civilians, even to leave unclear the attack occurred inside Israel, and to omit identifying the perpetrators — Palestinians. In contrast to the un-named Palestinian actors in the attack, a bolded headline above the caption made clear how Israel responded — by bombing Gaza — and this was repeated in the text of the caption. It read:

Israel Responds to Attacks by Bombing Gaza

Wounded Israeli soldiers were treated Thursday after gunmen attacked them near the border between Israel and Egypt. Eight Israelis were killed and more than 30 wounded in multiple attacks in the area. Israel responded with air strikes on Gaza.

The original AP photo caption that accompanied the image was far more clear and direct, making clear the attack occured in Israel and identifying Palestinians as involved. It read this way:

Wounded Israeli soldiers are treated at the site of a shooting attack along the border between Israel and Egypt, southern Israel, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011. Assailants armed with heavy weapons, guns and explosives crossed into southern Israel from the neighboring Egyptian Sinai peninsula on Thursday, killing six Israelis and wounding at least a dozen more in an audacious string of attacks that stoked concerns about Palestinian militants exploiting the recent instability in Egypt. (AP Photo/Yosi Ben)

At the Guardian, Israeli victims of terrorism are “people” who “died”; Palestinian militant victims of Israeli counter-strikes are killed. The Guardian reports:

Israel has launched airstrikes on Gaza after blaming militants in the Palestinian territory for deadly attacks near Eilat earlier in the day.

Militants said five Palestinians were killed in the strikes.

Earlier at least seven people died when squads of gunmen armed with heavy weapons and explosives crossed into southern Israel from Egypt and attacked buses, cars and an army patrol, officials said.

3:30 PM Update: The Guardian has updated its opening paragraphs, which are now somewhat more open about who “died” and how they were killed:

Israeli civilians and soldiers came under sustained attack on Thursday by militants in the south of the country in a co-ordinated and audacious assault spanning three hours that left at least seven people dead and around 40 injured.

The Israeli government and military said the assailants came from Gaza, and promised to use “full force” in retaliation. Hamas denied it was responsible and said it would defend Gaza with “all its strength”.

Within hours the Israelis had made good on their promise, killing up to six Palestinians in an air strike on Rafah, the Gaza town next to the border with Egypt. The dead were said to include the commander of the Popular Resistance Committee, Abu Awad Neirab.

In southern Israel, gunfire erupted again in the evening, with two people reported to be critically wounded.

Update II: Aug. 19, 8:25 AM EST: The Guardian has further improved its original language, transforming the people who died into Israelis. The story now states:

Israeli civilians and soldiers came under sustained attack on Thursday from militants in the south of the country in a co-ordinated and audacious three-pronged, three-hour assault that left at least seven Israelis dead and about 40 injured.

Palestinian attempts to erase the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, and all of Israel have been well documented. (See “REWRITING HISTORY: ERASING THE JEWISH CONNECTION TO HOLY SITES AND CREATING A FICTITIOUS ARAB HISTORY”)

These attempts seem to be on the increase – and not just by those who are considered radicals and on the fringe.

Just last week Palestinian Authority (Fatah) TV aired a documentary that referred to Jews praying at the Western Wall as “sins and filth” and discussed ultimate Palestinian plans to take over the area and erase its Jewish sites. Palestinian Media Watch exposed this recent example in the clip below.

The entrenched bias of the BBC is evident once again in its guide to the Palestinian plan to ask the UN to recognize its statehood. The guide, titled “Q & A: Palestinian Statehood Bid at the UN“, selectively omits key historical facts in order to portray Israel as the obstacle to peace.

The following examples expose the BBC’s evasive presentation of the circumstances that led to the Palestinian decision to pursue a UN General Assembly vote:

1) The guide states that

The Palestinians … have long sought to establish an independent, sovereign state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War. Although the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has said he would prefer to achieve this through negotiations, two decades of on-and-off peace talks have failed to produce a deal.

The statement implicitly connects the Israeli control of these territories since 1967 with the failure to establish a sovereign Palestinian state. This ignores the central fact that a sovereign Palestinian state does not exist because Arab leaders rejected the UN resolution to establish it in 1947 since this would have required them to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state as well. The statement also ignores Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and offer to cede as much as 95 percent of the West Bank.

By claiming that Abbas would like to negotiate a solution while making no mention of Israeli efforts, the guide leaves the impression that Israel is responsible for the failure of negotiations. BBC should have clarified that Abbas, not Netanyahu, has refused to negotiate despite Israel’s agreeing to a ten month freeze on building on the West Bank in 2009.

2) The guide discusses how

The Palestinians and their supporters are also looking at ways to press for UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947 to be enforced. The resolution calls for the partition of British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one.

The BBC fails to inform that it was the Arabs who rejected the resolution and are responsible for it not being enforced.

3) In discussing UN Security Council Resolution 242, the BBC asserts,

Although Israel disputes the precise meaning of this, there is wide international acceptance that the pre-1967 frontiers should form the basis of a peace settlement.

In fact, as CAMERA has amply documented, the framers of the resolution, including British diplomats Lord Caradon and Baron George Brown, clearly established that the resolution does not require Israel to return to the pre-1967 boundaries. It is not, as the BBC contends, an Israeli dispute over the “precise meaning.”

4) While mentioning Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel, the BBC emphasizes that “the main opposition comes from Israel.” The phrasing emphasizes Israeli opposition to the UN plan in order to portray Israel as unreasonable in demanding negotiations, while presenting Hamas as acting reasonable for going along with the plan even though it has not modified it’s eliminationist stance.

The guide is a striking example of the unwillingness of the BBC to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict objectively even in what is purportedly an objective information piece.

Who cares if 50,000 young Gazans spend their summer getting paramilitary training and a large dose of radical politics? Not the New York Times! Or most any other news outlet.

AFP (Agence France Presse) was unique in covering the story. But reporter Adel Zaanoun should have dug a little deeper, instead of repeating the benign claims of the organizers. Zaanoun reported:

“These camps have no military or political dimension; they are held outdoors, with sports, cultural, educational, social and recreational activities,” said Saleh Hamdan, a member of the central committee for summer camps.

As the Terrorism and Information Center documents, the “recreational activities” definitely do have a military dimension! The report notes:

[A]s in previous years, in addition to the diverse social activities (soccer, swimming, entertainment), the summer camps also included three major themes reflecting Hamas’ agenda: paramilitary training, dissemination of Hamas’ political messages, and religious indoctrination in the spirit of radical Islam.

Hamas’ political messages include such statements as:

“The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Hamas Charter, Article Seven)

If Hamas’ ongoing indoctrination were on the front pages of a few newspapers or on CNN Hamas might have a harder time educating new generations of Israel-haters! But first there needs to be a new generation of journalists — that understands filling young minds with hate is an obstacle to peace — and worth reporting.

From the Telegraph:

For six years, Steven Sugar pursued a one-man legal battle against the BBC in an attempt to force it to disclose a secret report.

He was trying to get the corporation to publish an internal assessment off its coverage of the Middle East conflict, which he believed would reveal bias against Israel.

Mr Sugar won an appeal for a full court hearing but when he died of cancer in January at the age of 61 it appeared his mission was at an end.

Now, his widow, Fiona Paveley, has taken up the fight to reveal the contents of the 20,000-word document and the case is to be heard at the Supreme Court.

With the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) pursuing a declaration of recognition of a Palestinian state from the United Nations in September, little is heard from most major news media about the questionable legality and diplomatic contradictions such a declaration would entail.

Meanwhile, the U.N. will not consider the case for Kurdish statehood, which is far stronger than that for the Palestinian Arabs. Not surprisingly, mainstream media have all but ignored this glaring contrast.

New York Sun columnist Hillel Halkin put it succinctly:

The Palestinians have many friends, the Kurds have none. And so, viva Palestinian statehood — and down with statehood for the Kurds. Since principles have nothing to do with it, it may be beside the point to observe that, in principle, the Kurds have a far better case for statehood than do the Palestinians. They have their own unique language and culture, which the Palestinians do not have. They have had a sense of themselves as a distinct people for many centuries, which the Palestinians have not had. They have been betrayed repeatedly in the past 100 years by the international community and its promises, while the Palestinians have been betrayed only by their fellow Arabs.

The charters of both wings of the Palestinians — Fatah and Hamas — call for the elimination of Israel. This puts them on the wrong side of the U.N. charter since they vow enmity toward a member of the U.N. But the U.N. cares not about this.

(more…)

A must-read piece by former New York Times reporter Ari L. Goldman isn’t directly about coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it does provide insight into why and how the newspaper misleads about that conflict.

The article examines how journalists’ eyewitness reporting filed from Brooklyn during the Crown Heights riots was changed to fit the “frame” preferred by editors back at Times headquarters in Manhattan.

Goldman begins by noting that

Journalists initially framed the story as a “racial” conflict and failed to see the anti-Semitism inherent in the riots. As the 20th anniversary of the riots approaches, I find myself re-examining my own role in the coverage and trying to extract some lessons for myself and my profession.

He concludes:

I am telling my story in print for the first time because it is important that we journalists examine our mistakes and learn from them. Fitting stories into frames — whether about blacks and Jews, liberals or conservatives, Arabs and Israelis, Catholics and Protestants or Muslims and Jews — is wrong and even dangerous. Life is more complicated than that. And so is journalism.

Read the whole story here.

UPDATE: The Atlantic Wire commendably corrected the misstatements described below.

If it’s true that for two Jews there are three opinions, as an old Israeli adage claims, how will the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo cope with the influx of 1,600 new mayors? According to the Atlantic Wire, 1,600 hundred new “settlements” will be built in this small enclave.

A settlement, of course, is the name given to villages, towns and cities in the West Bank. So how is it possible to fit so many villages into one small neighborhood? It’s not.

As made clear in the Reuters story linked to from the Atlantic Wire piece, the recently approved plan calls for the building 1,600 homes. It’s bad enough to take sides by referring to Jerusalem neighborhoods as settlements when this characterization is a matter of dispute. Calling every home a settlement is simply ridiculous.

The Atlantic Wire has been informed of the error, and we’ll update you if they correct — or if they don’t.

Earlier today, blogger Adam Holland discovered a bigoted article on the website run by the Episcopal News Service and tweeted about it. CAMERA contacted the news service and complained about the outrageous bigotry in the article (detailed at Holland’s blog). The ENS responded by apologizing for publishing the article and taking it down from its website.

Good work, Adam.

Update Aug 15, 2011 : The article has been removed from ENS’ archives, but is still showing if people click on pre-existing link to the article. CAMERA has spoken to a staffer at ENS to address the problem. The assurance CAMERA has gotten is that at some point in the future — we do not know when — the offending paragraph will be deleted and an editor’s note will be put at the top of the article to inform readers that the article has been edited.